NUCLEAR CRISIS PLANS FOR INDIAN PT. PLANTS TERMED INADEQUATE

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A plan to protect the nearly 300,000 people who live near Indian Point in case of a nuclear accident is inadequate and may never be workable, according to some officials at the county, town and schooldistrict level who would be responsible for carrying it out.

Even those officials of the governments and the utilities who say the plan can be made workable cannot say when it could be. The safety plan for the two Indian Point reactors in Buchanan, N.Y., on the east bank of the Hudson River, is of special concern because the plants are in the most densely populated area of any reactor in the country.

Planners say that the plants at Indian Point present special difficulties because of the population density. Some of the problems raised by critics of the Indian Point plan are present at other reactor sites around the country, with similarly fragmented governmental units and population centers nearby.

There are 289,000 people living within a 10-mile radius, the area in which an accident could produce lethal doses of radiation. That area includes parts of Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Putnam Counties.

Some public officials who are critical of the plan say they may never know how reliable it is because so much depends on human factors. They do not know, for example, how many bus drivers, volunteer firemen and lower-level public employees would be willing to risk exposing themselves to radiation. Some school bus drivers, who would be assigned to take schoolchildren and the general public to safety, say they would be torn between their jobs and the safety of their families.

The plan for the two reactors includes a system for mobilizing government officials and law enforcement personnel, notifying the public about an accident, advising residents to take shelter in their homes and removing them from their homes and providing emergency shelter.

However, government officials at various levels doubt that any of those functions could now be accomplished. And the more pessimistic municipal officials doubt that the plans for shelter and evacuation could ever be implemented, no matter how much advance preparation were done.

The most recent evaluation of the plan by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found it ''generally adequate,'' but the agency is waiting for an evaluation of a drill March 3.

Criticisms of the plan emerged from interviews over the last month, and some were confirmed in the drill March 3. Among those interviewed who were critical of the plan were R. Raleigh D'Adamo, Transportation Commissioner of Westchester County; Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester County legislator; Richard Herbek, village manager of Croton-on-Hudson, and Dick Bower, disaster coordinator for the volunteer

Spokesmen for the utilities say that an accident requiring action by the general public is unlikely and that the plan will work if the public cooperates.

''If you can't operate on that assumption, society can't operate in any kind of emergency,'' said Cliff Spieler, a spokesman for the Power Authority of the State of New York, which owns and operates Indian Point 3. Mr. Spieler acknowleged that many details remained to be worked out. The other plant, Indian Point 2, is owned and operated by the Consolidated Edison Company. Standards Set by U.S.

The Federal Government sets numerous requirements for the utilities. They are required to have a method for notifying everyone living within 10 miles of the plants within 30 minutes and to have plans for alerting those people to take shelter or leave their homes, depending on the circumstances. Evacuation or shelter would be necessary for those in the immediate area or downwind. The Government has set no specific standard for the maximum permissible time for evacuation. ambulance corps in Rockland County.

Problems pointed out by various government officials range from tiny details to mammoth structural difficulties and include these:

- If an alert were ordered, residents would be given instructions not by town but by ''emergency planning area'' and would be required to know which of the 46 areas they lived in. County and local officials doubt that residents of one emergency planning area would stay put when those in another were told to leave. Under some circumstances, evacuation would cause greater exposure than staying indoors.

- If an evacuation were ordered, buses would be summoned by radio to pick up people without cars. But so far not all the buses have radios, and virtually none of the drivers know the routes.

- Large parts of the siren system, which is meant to alert residents to turn on their radios, failed in the drill March 3. New tests are under way.

- If the accident happened outside business hours, Alfred B. DelBello, the Westchester County Executive, who would decide what steps to take in areas adjacent to the reactors, would be telephoned at home. However, the home phone number listed in the emergency plan is disconnected. Mr. DelBello moved from that house over a year ago. The plan also confuses state routes with county and United States routes. N.R.C. to Begin Hearings

During the March 3 drill, the officials generally performed well in communicating with one another and making decisions about evacuation, according to preliminary statements by Federal observers. But that drill involved only a fraction of the number of workers who would be needed in the field in an actual emergency.

The adequacy of the emergency plan is a key issue before a special Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel that is to begin hearings soon. The N.R.C. panel will consider whether the two reactors should be shut permanently for safety reasons.

The N.R.C. has the authority to revoke the license of a reactor for lack of an adequate emergency plan, but it has not yet done so. Some utility officials and nuclear critics doubt that it would.

The N.R.C. is reserving comment on most of the safety plan until it hears from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an independent agency that is in charge of the Federal response to natural and manmade accidents. The agency has found numerous defects in the plan, but so far has avoided making an assessment of the full plan.

''We are not happy with the plan,'' said Ihor W. Husar, an emergency management specialist in the New York office of the agency. ''We have found the plan requires a lot of work. The state's now beginning to realize how large a project they've got.'' Another Line of Defense

Such a plan is supposed to be another line of defense if the numerous safety systems in the reactors fail and a substantial release of radiaion occurs. The N.R.C. ordered that plans be drawn up for all nuclear reactors after the accident at Three Mile Island three years ago.

The Indian Point plan was supposed to have been ready for use by April 1, 1981. It was ordered begun nearly three years ago, and the utilities hired consultants to develop integrated plans for the reactors, the counties and the state, and has cost the utilities over $2.5 million. .

When the N.R.C. examined the plan last April and found numerous defects, it threatened to shut the plants unless improvements were made by August. The threat was lifted, however, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency ruled that improvements in the plan and changes in New York State law meant that ''the present state of planning is generally adequate to carry out the responsibilities of the state and local governments.'' Evaluation Is Awaited

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The agency added, however, that ''a judgment of the overall adequacy of the preparedness could not be provided until the results of the exercises'' March 3 were evaluated. The evaluation is expected in a few weeks.

Public education is seen as one of the biggest problems. ''When you blow the sirens, will people go indoors or outdoors?'' asked Mr. DelBello. He added that in the area nearest the plants, ''we could get gridlock with very little panic.''

There are many other problems. County officials are worried that under current laws they have little authority to direct volunteers or town workers to perform such functions as assisting the disabled and directing traffic.

Dr. Jan Beyea of the National Audubon Society and other critics, citing studies performed for the N.R.C., are concerned that the plan, by concentrating on the 10-mile radius, covers too small an area.

They have urged that the plan be expanded to a radius of at least 50 miles, the area in which immediate illnesses are considered possible, or to a 200-mile radius, the area in which the latent risk of cancer could be substantially increased. A 50-mile circle would include nearly all of New York City and parts of Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Area Downwind of Plants

Since contamination moves with the wind, any evacuation would probably cover only the area downwind of the plants. Nonetheless, the wind would not have to blow far from the 239-acre site: Peekskill is less than a mile away, and the Bronx is 24 miles from the plants.

As more local officials in the four counties with sections within the 10-mile area, have become involved in emergency drills, the number of people who are skeptical about the plan's implementation has increased. In Rockland, volunteer firemen and ambulance drivers boycotted the March 3 drill because of what they called a lack of training, equipment and advance preparation for an accident. Participation, according to Mr. Bower, the ambulance disaster coordinator, would leave the impression that they found this situation acceptable.

Local police departments complain that they do not have the equipment or training to carry out the plan. In Westchester, for example, 6,000 police officers must be trained in radiation-protection procedures. On the day of the drill, 200 had been trained. In Croton-on-Hudson, Chief Reginald Lambruschi said none of his 17-officers had been trained. ''If you were shining in the dark, I wouldn't know what to do with you,'' he said.

Emergency workers would need dosimeters to measure their radiation exposure, but very few are ready for immediate distribution. 'Decent Training Program'

Pamphlets have been mailed to thousands of businesses and households in the 10-mile zone listing emergency bus stops for those who do not have cars. In many cases, however, the agreements with the bus companies have not been made. Some bus union officials have not heard of the plan.

''Until there is a decent training program, where drivers know what might be expected of them, what hazards there are or aren't, how to measure radiation with dosimeters, only then will they be able to evaluate whether they want to volunteer,'' said Mr. D'Adamo, the Westchester Transportation Commissioner. ''Only then will we know whether a program is do-able or not.''

''We haven't signed off on this plan,'' said Mr. DelBello. ''It's not our plan until we can go before the public and say we're comfortable that everyone has done the best they can do.'' The other three counties have also withheld their approval, which the N.R.C. requires. Officials in Orange and Putnam, which have smaller populations, have fewer criticisms of the plan than do officials in Westchester and Rockland.

The first phase of the plan, which involves notifying key decisionmakers and determining the seriousness of an accident, also presents the first problem, some officials say. County and local officials worry that they must rely on operators of the reactors to pick up a hot line to notify them. Public Representative Sought

Westchester officials, noting that Con Edison failed to notify them promptly of a leak of Hudson River water into the containment building 18 months ago at Indian Point 2, have asked, so far unsuccessfully, that a public representative be stationed in the control room 24 hours a day, paid for by the utility, instead of an employee already stationed there.

Under the plan, a county employee would be sent to the plant at the ''alert'' stage, the second-lowest category of accident. The employee, an X-ray equipment inspector with special N.R.C. training, would go to an emergency operations center at the plant, where some data from the control room would be available.

Officials also say the communications equipment needs work. The link between the plant site and the Emergency Operations Center in the basement of the county office building in White Plains failed during a communications drill last month, although it functioned on March 3. In the more recent test, however, a hot line connecting the four county emergency centers and a similar center in Albany cut off Orange County.

The counties need teams to measure radioactivity, but equipment is scarce. Westchester has instruments for three teams, but the plan calls for a dozen. Safety officials are studying whether they could operate with fewer. Accurate Weather Readings

In a release of radiation, measuring its effect depends on accurate weather observations at the plant. Last Jan. 25, an apparent malfunction of the state's system in an accident at the Robert E. Ginna reactor in Ontario, N.Y., may have left monitoring crews looking for radiation outside the downwind area.

At dozens of places in the plan, county workers, municipal officials and school officials would be called to duty or receive instructions by telephone, and the operation of the telephone system is uncertain.

According to Robert Edney, a spokesman for the New York Telephone Company, the company could quickly reapportion the capacity available to make sure that emergency agencies would have access to telephone service. However, local agencies expect that their switchboards would be flooded, which would make it difficult or impossible to place outgoing calls.

Without telephones, the ambulance system would near collapse. In the March 3 drill, Edward Creen, who is in charge of ambulance communication in Westchester, tried from the White Plains emergency center to contact six ambulance corps by radio; he failed in five cases and made broken contact in the sixth.

During an evacuation, roads would be ''real tight'' but would not come to a standstill, according to Bruce E. Podwal, vice president of Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas Inc., an engineering consulting firm. The consultants estimated that evacuation would be possible within 15 hours and 20 minutes. Based on studies of nonnuclear emergencies, he said, ''stampede and panic don't occur.''

Others wonder. ''The fear in everybody's mind is, once that alarm goes off, what's the psychology?'' said David S. Siegel, superintendent of the Croton-Harmon Union Free School District. He said he envisioned chaotic conditions and a difficult trip out of the area. ''It would be a very, very, very slow trip. Probably you could walk it faster than you could drive it.''

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 1982, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: NUCLEAR CRISIS PLANS FOR INDIAN PT. PLANTS TERMED INADEQUATE. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe